Related Stories

An engineer in fibre optics and two scientists who figured out how to turn light into electronic signals, work that has paved the way for the internet age, have been awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for physics.

Professor Charles Kao has won half the 10 million Swedish crown (A$1.6 million) prize for a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fibre optics, determining how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibres.

Dr Willard Boyle and Dr George Smith shared the other half for inventing the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor.

"This year's Nobel prize in physics is awarded for two scientific achievements that have helped to shape the foundations of today's networked societies," the award- committee said in a statement.

Their achievements have allowed vast amounts of information to be sent around the globe almost instantaneously, as trillions of signals make their way through tiny glass fibres now long enough to encircle the planet more than 25,000 times.

Dr Robert Kirby-Harris, head of Britain's Institute of Physics, says nothing better symbolised the information age than the Internet and digital cameras.

"From kilobytes to gigabytes, and now to petabytes and exabytes, information has never been so free-flowing or ... so instantly visual," he says.

From YouTube to Hubble

In 1966, Kao discovered that light could travel long distances reliably via glass fibres, and four years later, produced the first 'ultrapure' fibre.

"These low-loss glass fibres facilitate global broadband communication such as the internet," the committee said. "Text, music, images and video can be transferred around in the globe in a split second."

Kao, who was vice-chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1987 to 1996, says news of the award left him "absolutely speechless".

"This is very, very unexpected," he says.

"Fibre optics has changed the world of information so much in these last 40 years. It certainly is due to the fibre optical networks that the news has travelled so fast."

A large proportion of the traffic over those networks is made up of digital images, which is where Boyle and Smith come in. In 1969, they invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a so-called charge-coupled device.

"It revolutionised photography, as light can be captured electronically instead of on film," the committee said.

Professor Martin Barstow of the University of Leicester in Britain, says the impact of the invention had been immense.

"From YouTube to the Hubble Space Telescope, these devices are now at the heart of our digital video and still cameras and underpin the extraordinary progress made in astronomy during the past 20 to 30 years," he says.

The work by Boyle and Smith, both employed by Bell Laboratories before retiring more than 20 years ago, led to progress in areas from microsurgery to space exploration.

"When the Mars probe was on the surface of Mars and (they) used a camera like ours - that wouldn't have been possible without our invention," says Boyle.

The invention has had other repercussions, some considered less welcome by privacy-minded people.

"We are the ones who started this profusion of little, small cameras working all over the world," Boyle added.

At Bell Labs from 1953 to 1979, Boyle led research in optical and satellite communications, digital and quantum electronics, computing and radio astronomy. Among his credits, he helped NASA choose a site for the Apollo landing on the Moon.

Smith has led research aimed at creating lasers and other semiconductor devices and he now serves as an adviser to universities and Canadian government laboratories.